A suspicious death in Acadia National Park brings ISB investigators Felicity Harland and Ferdinand Huxley to a remote island off the coast of Maine.

When the chief ranger calls ISB to report a dead body on one of Acadia’s satellite islands, Harland and Hux travel by ferry to Isle au Haut, a tight-knit community of fewer than a hundred year-round residents. In summer, the island swells with tourists who come to explore the national park on the island’s western shore, but in winter, the two investigators feel like unwelcome invaders.

To make matters worse, there is no body—at least not the one Harland and Hux came to the island to investigate. Instead, they find a local homesteader dead in his cabin, which local authorities are quick to rule a suicide. Harland thinks the scene was staged, but since the man died on private land, her hands are tied. 

As Harland and Hux prepare to leave, the case takes a sudden turn that sends them on a desperate search into a frigid and forbidding wilderness. Out here, Harland suspects that the only way to uncover the truth is to trust the very people that don’t trust them, even if that means putting herself in harm’s way.  

Because on an island this remote, secrets have a way of staying buried—especially the ones worth killing for.